


Such a Perfect Place to Start

by ExtraPenguin



Category: Original Work, The World Is Not Enough - Garbage (Music Video)
Genre: Androids, F/F, Inspired by Pygmalion and Galatea (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Mad Scientists, Robots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-27
Updated: 2020-05-27
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24409396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 5
Collections: Jukebox 2020





	Such a Perfect Place to Start

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weakinteraction](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/gifts).



The woman who currently called herself Ingrid Schultz watched her creation punch a mirror to shards. She looked closely at Ava's knuckles – yes, the pseudoskin was unharmed. Much better than the last version.

The suits funding the mission had brought in a sacrificial mark as well. The man reacted like most men would when faced with an accurate reproduction of Eunice Lind: he walked right up to her, smiled, and let her kiss him.

Oh, Ava was good at this. Warmth blossomed in Ingrid's heart as Ava held the man's head and kissed him until he collapsed dead.

"A consummate success," one of the suits said. "You may proceed, Doctor Schultz."

"Yes, Sir," Ingrid said. In the other room, smoke still rose from the dead man's mouth.

She and Ava had come a long way. The Autonomous Vehicular Assembly had originally been built for search and rescue. Then funding had dried up, and Ingrid had had to adapt. Search and rescue had only ever been a stepping stone.

Crime paid here on the edges of the world. Ava had remained Ava while Ingrid had changed names whenever convenient.

Years, burned identities, and versions of Ava later, she'd finally found an outfit that would fund what she'd first set out to build: an android who could pass for a human.

Now, of course, she had to blow up her masterpiece, but such was the price of success. Ava had blown herself up many times before, starting from the very first shady org when she'd been just a search and rescue bot with a creator-caused existential crisis. Ingrid always made sure the important bits would survive and that someone would extract them. Most of the time, it was her.

Ingrid had Ava lie down on her front. The bomb came from elsewhere in the organization – the people next door, some shady subcontractor, made by the one of the suits with his own hands; Ingrid had never been that interested in things beyond her quest and working on the wrong side of the law had not changed that at all.

"What more am I getting?" Ava asked, naked on the tabletop.

"It's a blow yourself up mission, this time," Ingrid said as she slid her hands over Ava's smooth pseudoskin. It was almost the same temperature as her real skin, but made of a variety of polymers and plastics with embedded sensors, a marvel of engineering rather than evolution.

"Ah." Ava smiled a predatory smile.

She'd been through dozens of shapes and forms in her few years of sentient-like existence, and even more forms before that. For her, exploding and being reborn in another body was normal, like it never would be for a creature of flesh.

In her quest to make an artificial human, Ingrid had created something wonderfully alien. The juxtaposition sent thrills up her spine.

Was this how Pygmalion had felt when he carved ivory into the shape of the perfect woman? But Ingrid didn't need Aphrodite's blessing to breathe the breath of life to her creation.

"Doctor Schultz," one of the techs said.

She paused her stroking of Ava's pseudoskin. "Yes?"

"The bomb," the tech said.

"Of course." Ingrid pressed at a hidden seam at the nape of Ava's neck and the skin peeled off the body.

The body itself was for the most part aluminium alloy with carbon fiber composite additions. She'd be a bit heavy for her size, but not too egregious. Ingrid had taken special care to ensure most of the structure could be manufactured in a decent machine shop. The skin was the expensive bit.

Ava's back split open and exposed the wiring within. Ingrid took a moment to admire her handiwork before taking the bomb from the tech's hands and securing it within Ava's chest cavity. It was as long as Ava's ribcage.

The tech armed the bomb. Ava sighed and lowered her head in a surprisingly human manner.

It took all the effort Ingrid had to resist stroking Ava's hair as she closed up Ava's torso. All would come in good time.

Ingrid flew over with Ava, along with one of the handlers. The target was Eunice Lind's concert at the New Globe Theater: jam-packed with the movers and shakers of society out to blow their money and hobnob at afterparties. Security would match – but no-one would check the main singer to see if she was a bomb.

"Do you have all the maps loaded?" Ingrid asked.

"Yes," Ava said. "Drive over and park three blocks to the North, go through the storm drains to the service hatch and through it to the backstage corridors. Go to Eunice Lind's dressing room and take her place. Sing her opener. Explode."

Ingrid smiled. "Good girl." She stroked Ava's arm. The pseudoskin was smooth to the touch. "Go do your thing."

Ava smiled back, smug and predatory. "I will."

She turned around and got into her car. It rumbled to a start and then Ava was off. It had taken some effort to change up the self-driving car code Ingrid had hacked off a car manufacturer's server to work with Ava's humanoid form, but it meant dropoff could be further away, and the outfit always enjoyed that.

The car disappeared behind the next blocks of buildings. Ingrid sighed. 

"Time to return to the safehouse," the handler said.

"Of course." Another handler would pick them up from a nearby location, then he and this one would retrieve the car Ava had used later in the evening while Ingrid sat alone in the safehouse.

They walked into the park with its carefully manicured lawns, paved paths, and tiny ponds. It was a pale mockery of the wilderness.

The park's other edge finished in some actual regions let run wild with weed at the edges of the steep-banked river with its jagged drop and small hydropower plant. They walked next to the edge for a while before stepping on the footbridge across the river. The anonymous car would be on the other side.

Ingrid carefully stepped up to the bridge's edge and leaned on the railing. The city opened up wonderfully, full of life and bustling with the confidence of people who did not yet know they were doomed.

"You do not want to be late," the handler said forbiddingly.

"Of course." Ingrid straightened herself and slipped on a patch wet from the spray. She fell through a gap in the railing, where the bolts attaching the mesh to the steel had rusted through and couldn't hold up to the impact.

The handler rushed to the edge and leaned over – perhaps unwisely – but couldn't see anything. He rushed to the rendez-vous point while on the phone with his higher-ups.

In the end, the New Globe Theater blew up in a spectacular fireball. The business was such that things were discarded once they were no longer of use. Ingrid Schultz had fulfilled her purpose already. They left her for dead, to be yet another anonymous corpse that might wash up on the power plant's nets.

Ava had started life as an Autonomous Vehicular Assembly for search and rescue. One of the things that first Ava had been designed for was rescuing people out of collapsed buildings. The algorithms were still there, part of the first conditioning for the neural net used to build a succession of more elaborate Avas. When the backup mode activated, it was easy for Ava to shed her human form and for the machinery running her to crawl out of her head and neck in its inner form with chain tracks and inconspicuous casing.

The collapsed New Globe Theater was large and heavy, and the actual search and rescue teams active. Ava's instructions were to avoid them.

In addition to the mission-essential items and her own software, she had been loaded with maps. She used them to find the entry to an access tunnel that had been meant from the start to be accessed only by robots and crawled.

She crawled from tunnel to tunnel, weaving her way through the internal access systems. After hours of crawling she found the place where the internal access systems crossed over with the network of municipal storm drains and squeezed her way through the opening.

There her progress was much faster, unimpeded as it was by the detritus of explosions and tunnel collapse. She'd crossed over at dawn and by noon was climbing her way out of the drains.

The location she'd chosen was an unremarkable place several dozen blocks from the explosion. The streets were muted after the tragedy, with only a single woman sitting on a bench next to the storm drain, reading a newspaper.

She set down the paper. "Hello," the woman no longer known as Ingrid Schultz said.

Ava beeped happily and drove circles around the woman's feet. The woman patted her top as she gently placed Ava in her satchel.

Next, she hailed a taxi to the motel she was staying at. In a few weeks, the furor would die down, and while the organization would continue its ways, the two of them would be out of its sights. And in a hidden location there were enough materials, pseudoskin and face morphs and spare parts, stashed away to build two full humanoid bodies for Ava.

There she could accomplish her mission. It had been huge and ambitious, and every step had been fought by those who thought it was impossible, but she had succeeded. And that success could be built on.


End file.
